Hiragana Chart: All 46 Characters, Their Sounds, and Real Example Words

The hiragana chart: all 46 basic characters

Here's the full hiragana chart. Each row gives the character, its rōmaji in the Hepburn system (the romanization used on Japanese road signs, in passports, and in most textbooks), a plain-English sound hint, and a real Japanese word that uses it.

The grid has a logic worth seeing before you memorize anything. Five vowels come first, in the order a, i, u, e, o, and every consonant after that pairs with those same five in the same order, which is why か き く け こ reads ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. The table is called the gojūon, 'fifty sounds'; two of its characters, ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we), were retired in Japan's 1946 spelling reform, leaving the 46 below.

Four characters break the pattern and catch almost everyone. し is shi, not 'si'. ち is chi, not 'ti'. つ is tsu, not 'tu'. And ふ is fu, a soft sound halfway between f and h, made by pushing air between loosely rounded lips rather than biting your bottom lip. The last two rows are special cases in their own right, and both get a section below.

The hiragana chart with dakuten and handakuten

Add two short strokes to the top right of a character and its consonant becomes voiced. That mark is the dakuten, nicknamed ten-ten ('dot dot'), and the swap is completely regular: k turns into g, s into z, t into d, and h into b. Replace those strokes with a small circle, the handakuten (or maru, 'circle'), on the h row only, and you get p.

These are not 25 new letters, just one mark sitting on shapes you read five minutes ago. Two pairs land on the same sound: じ and ぢ are both 'ji', ず and づ are both 'zu'. Modern spelling picks じ and ず nearly every time, and ぢ and づ survive in a few compounds where the original ち or つ still shows.

Twenty-five extra sounds, zero extra shapes.

Yōon: the small ゃ, ゅ and ょ

Take any character from the i column (き, し, ち, に, ひ, み, り, ぎ, じ, び, ぴ) and follow it with a half-size ゃ, ゅ or ょ. The two squeeze into one beat: き (ki) plus a small ゃ gives きゃ (kya), a single mora, not 'ki-ya'. These blends are called yōon, and Japanese counting words and Chinese-derived vocabulary lean on them constantly.

Size does all the work, and it isn't subtle once you know to look. びょういん (byōin) is a hospital. びよういん (biyōin), with a full-size よ, is a beauty salon.

Four of those combinations barely appear in native Japanese, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than pretending every cell earns its keep. ひゅ, みゅ, びゅ and ぴゅ turn up mostly in borrowed words, which get written in katakana anyway.

Hiragana vs katakana: which script does what

Both scripts cover the identical 46 sounds, so か and カ are both 'ka'. What separates them is the job, not the pronunciation: hiragana is the grammar, katakana is the import lane. Our full hiragana vs katakana comparison settles which to learn first and what each script is doing in a real sentence.

Hiragana writes native Japanese words like ここ (koko, here), the grammar particles は, が, を, に, で, へ and の, and okurigana, the verb and adjective endings hung off a kanji stem. 食べる (taberu, to eat) keeps 食 as kanji and writes べる in hiragana, so 食べます and 食べた shift tense without touching the kanji. It also supplies furigana, the reading hints printed beside unfamiliar kanji.

Katakana covers a narrower beat: loanwords, foreign names, onomatopoeia, scientific animal and plant names, and emphasis. The katakana chart is this page's companion, built to the same layout, and it's the one to read second. Strip the katakana out of a page and it mostly still makes sense; strip the hiragana out and it falls apart.

The special cases: っ, ん, and the particles は, へ, を

Three rules cause more beginner mistakes than all 46 characters put together.

The small っ doubles the next consonant. A half-size つ tucked between two characters doesn't say 'tsu' at all. It holds the following consonant for one silent beat, like the catch in the middle of 'uh-oh'. That pause is a full mora, so it takes as long to say as any other character in the word.

Ask for きて at a post office counter and you've told the clerk to come over. Ask for きって and you get your stamp. In print the small っ sits noticeably lower than a full つ, so train your eye on size rather than shape.

ん is the only standalone consonant. Every other character in the chart is a vowel or a consonant plus a vowel. ん is a nasal sound by itself and counts as its own beat: ほん (hon, book) is two beats, ho and n, not one syllable the way English would treat it. It never begins a Japanese word.

Its sound shifts to match whatever follows, which is why さんぽ (sanpo, a walk) comes out closer to 'sampo' and りんご (ringo, apple) picks up the 'ng' of 'sing'. Say the word at normal speed and your mouth does this for you.

は, へ and を change their reading as particles. This is the single biggest source of beginner confusion, and it's a leftover from older kana spelling that Japan's modern rules deliberately kept.

Here they are doing their jobs:

• わたしはがくせいです。(Watashi wa gakusei desu.) 'I'm a student.' That は is read 'wa'.
• がっこうへいきます。(Gakkō e ikimasu.) 'I'm going to school.' That へ is read 'e'.
• みずをのみます。(Mizu o nomimasu.) 'I drink water.' を is read 'o'.

The rule is positional, not random, which makes it far easier than it first sounds. Inside an ordinary word は is always 'ha': はな (hana) is a flower, never 'wana'. Only when は stands between two chunks of a sentence does it become 'wa'. Same for へ. を is simpler still: it exists only as the object particle, so it's always 'o'.

One famous case sits on the line. こんにちは (konnichiwa, hello) and こんばんは (konbanwa, good evening) both end in は read 'wa', because each was once a full sentence with こんにち ('this day') as its topic. The greeting froze and the particle stayed behind.

Long vowels: おう or おお, えい or ええ

Holding a vowel for two beats instead of one changes the word outright. おばさん (obasan) is 'aunt'; おばあさん (obāsan) is 'grandmother'. One extra あ is the whole difference.

Katakana marks this with a single bar (ー). Hiragana repeats a vowel character instead:

The bottom two rows are where learners get caught. Long 'e' is normally written えい and long 'o' is normally written おう, even though both come out as one held vowel in ordinary speech. せんせい lands much closer to 'sensē' than to 'sen-say', and とうきょう (Tōkyō) is 'to-o-kyo-o', four beats, not 'toe-key-oh'.

A short and genuinely closed list of words breaks the pattern and uses おお instead: おおきい (ōkii, big), おおい (ōi, many), とおい (tōi, far), とお (tō, ten), こおり (kōri, ice), おおかみ (ōkami, wolf), and ほのお (honō, flame). There's no rule hiding behind the split, only history, so learn these few by sight and write おう everywhere else. ええ is rarer still, showing up mainly in おねえさん (onēsan, older sister).

Look-alike hiragana, grouped for study

Study these in groups, never one at a time. Your eye learns a shape by contrast, so putting the near-twin right next to it is what makes each one stick.

れ / ね / わ. All three open with the same vertical stroke, and the difference is in how the second stroke finishes. ね ties into a loop at the bottom, and ねこ means cat, so picture a curled tail. わ curves round and stops. れ kicks out to the right and upward.

さ / き / ち. Count the crossbars first: き has two, さ and ち have one each. Then check the tail, because ち is essentially さ facing the other way, a mirror image.

は / ほ / ま. は and ほ both stand on a vertical stroke down the left side; ま has no such leg. ほ is simply は with one extra horizontal bar, and ま finishes with a loop at the bottom that neither of the others has.

る / ろ. Identical apart from the ending. る curls into a small loop; ろ stops open. Loop means ru, open means ro.

ぬ / め. The same trick again. ぬ finishes in a loop, like noodles twirled onto chopsticks; め stops without one. If you can tell る from ろ, you know this one too.

Japanese sits near the top of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers, and running three scripts at once is a large part of why. Hiragana is the smallest and friendliest of the three.

Mnemonics, stroke order, and a daily practice loop

A shape hook turns a scary character into something familiar, and a picture you invented is stickier than one you were handed. A few learners keep returning to:

• つ (tsu) starts つなみ (tsunami), and the character looks like a wave curling over.
• め (me) simply means eye on its own, so the character and the word teach each other.
• き (ki) sounds like the English 'key' and carries two little teeth like one.
• ふ (fu) is often drawn as Mount Fuji, ふじさん, which starts with the same sound.

Stroke order is worth getting right from day one. Handwriting input on phones and tablets reads the order and direction of your strokes, not only the finished picture, so a character built in the wrong sequence can fail to register. The rules are top to bottom, left to right, and a horizontal stroke before the vertical that crosses it. For animated diagrams, the Genki hiragana chart from The Japan Times plays stroke order and audio for all 46, and Wikipedia's hiragana article covers where these shapes came from.

For daily practice, read the example words aloud, then name each character with the rōmaji column covered. If you would rather drill on a phone, our comparison of the best apps to learn Japanese sorts nine of them by what each one is genuinely good at. Numbers are the natural next step, and the Japanese numbers guide uses the same kana you just learned. The Japanese hub lines up what comes after that.